New kevinthom.com

I had the chance in the last few days to redo my website. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, gathering ideas, figuring out problems that needed solving. The things I wanted to achieve were:

Create a clean and modern layout

Make it easy to maintain and update

Feature, in detail, some of my favorite photos

Improve my search engine placement in key areas

Make the site more business-oriented to make it easier for people to find information about hiring me and licensing my images

Guide people into the right areas of my full portfolio, which has gotten too big to navigate

Modernize my full portfolio to make it match the new site

I finally put it all together in a mass of CSS, PHP, Javascript and MySQL. I learned a lot about these things in the last week… probably more than I ever wanted to know. I saved myself a lot of trouble by using Gallery to manage my photos and testimonials. Gallery is great for producing thumbnails and storing the descriptions and photos in a database. All I had to do was learn how to write some code that would pull this info out of the database and put it on the screen so it looks nice.

6 Comments

hesi
on August 22, 2007 at 3:04 pm

It is awesome!
I love how simple it is and yet how much it has. I love the little blurbs under the images with the links. I think it would be cool if it landed on a random photo every time you load the page. 🙂

maybe some day i’ll redesign the full portfolio. actually, it shouldn’t be hard to do now that i’ve written all the SQL queries and a basic framework. the difficult thing will be to replace the system i have in place for showing clients their proofs (password protected) and maintaining the search engine placement of my photos from that gallery.